Google+ and SEO
I was fortunate to be invited by my mate @johnmcclumpha to Google+ last week. I’m a fan. Google’s other forays into social media have been ordinary to say this least. Google+ though is very different. I won’t review it here as there are plenty of great reviews out there already. Suffice to say it will pose a threat to Facebook, Twitter (Google dumped Realtime search this week as they really don’t need it with Google+) & Skype (if you watch the video to the end today you’ll see why Skype could see some drop off in usage as well) . How much of a threat to their user share only time will tell.
SEO
There are a couple of things that are interesting from an SEO perspective. How Google+ affects your rankings and how your content appears in Google+. Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ is conducting an experiment right now on how “shares” of links affect ranking in the SERPs. It seems that they will have a similar impact to facebook shares. They signal popularity or content app Sparks inside Google+ is a tool that helps you find content you may be interested in. Janet Driscoll Miller had a great post on it today as did Barry Schwartz of SEO Roundtable. Both of these posts discussed how Google+ was deciding what content would display in Sparks (SEOs can’t help it :)). As I’d been wondering the same thing and had been researching (trying to break it) over the weekend, I thought I’d show you a couple of tests I ran this morning in this week’s Vlog. Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
